


A Hard School

by quigonejinn



Category: Captain America (2011), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-19
Updated: 2012-07-19
Packaged: 2017-11-10 06:42:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/463350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iron Man sixty-five years early.  <i>Howard begins, almost deliriously, to try to pull the wires out. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	A Hard School

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the wrongest, baddest thing I've ever written. In fact, on my scale, it's pretty much clean of anything worse than a non-welcome smooch. 
> 
> On the other hand, this is not a fic in which things end well.

Howard Stark pilots a plane into enemy territory. 

...

Howard Stark is the finest civilian pilot that Peggy knows. 

Howard Stark flies Steve over the front with Peggy acting as copilot until it's time to see Steve off; they get into enemy territory, and Steve jumps out with a parachute before they can get any closer, so they turn the plane around and head back: The plane is shot down two miles before the border, and Howard Stark has a memory of flames and heat and fear. He has memories of pain, and he wakes up in an underground complex with wires leading out of his chest. A small, soft-looking man with round glasses turns around and looks at him. It's cold enough in the room for Howard's breath to hang into the air. 

Howard begins, almost deliriously, to try to pull the wires out. 

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," the small, soft-looking man says. 

Stop me if you've heard this story before. 

...

The small, soft-looking man is named Arnim Zola, and he is not a nice man: Howard doesn't trust him, particularly when he explains why he saved Howard's life. They have a few words about how Zola believes that he'll help with converting some kind of energy source they have into usable weapons, since in a time with Einstein and Oppenheimer and Bethe and Teller, Stark is still probably the greatest pure engineering genius alive. Howard tells him, in even ruder, more graphic terms, involving more barnyard animals, to go fuck himself. 

"What did you do to me?" Howard touches the metal ring set in his chest. 

"I saved your life. We removed all the shrapnel we could, but there was more headed into your heart." 

"Let me guess. The battery, the magnets, electrical field, keeping it from reaching into the septum. Take away the battery, how quickly do I drop?" 

Arnim looks. He looks soft; he looks weak, but Howard can see the fear on his face whenever Howard takes a little longer to answer or when Howard gives an uncooperative answer. There is someone hard behind him, and Howard files the information away. 

"You're the greatest engineering mind of this century," Zola says. "Let us hope you never find out."  
...

HYDRA wants him to help them make weapons, and Howard refuses. They tie his hands behind his back, dunk his his head into water, and they pull him out. They ask if he's ready to cooperate. He doesn't have a military rank or serial number, so he just yells _Howard Stark, Stark Industries_ and the first eight digits of _e_. They put him back in, hold him a little longer this time, and he takes another deep breath and yells _Howard Stark, Stark Industries_ and the measurements of this blonde he used to see in New York who was in a show where she was undressed except for a paper mache moon that she held over her relevant parts. Howard notes the fact that they could pull his fingernails out; they could break his bones, but they want his hands to be sound. Able to work, able to make things. 

Howard Stark is, possibly, a little tougher than his son: he came up in a rougher school. The bravado helps him stay brave, and Phillips had warned that he might be interrogated if he was ever captured. 

The third time, they combine the water with hitting him in the stomach while he's gasping on the floor. It keeps him from breathing deep, and when he goes under the water, they hold him under long enough that he blacks out. They wake him by putting smelling salts under his nose, and he comes to on the floor, hands still tied. 

"We know what you flew into German airspace for," Zola says, crouching down next to Howard. "Your friend destroyed one of our factory camps."

Howard wants to say something smart, but he hurts; his head aches; his eyes won't focus properly. The water made the rope around his wrists swell, and it's cutting into his wrists. Howard tests his wrists against them, and the guard on the left side of Howard kicks him in the stomach, viciously hard, and Howard instinctively curls up around himself as best as he can with the ropes tight around his wrists. 

Zola bends close, and Howard can see on his face: Zola is thinking about threatening Peggy, and Howard holds very still, so as not to give him a reason to do it. They put his head back into the water one more time; they keep it there one more time until he blacks out one more time, and after he wakes on the floor, on his knees, hands tied behind his back, after he stops vomiting water and bile all over himself, he tells them, _yes_. 

Have you heard this story before? 

...

When Steve Rogers brings four hundred men back to camp, there is cheering; the men of the 107th are happy to see their friends, and when Steve surrenders himself for disciplinary action, Phillips looks him for a long moment. Bucky Barnes starts the cheer for Steve; the noise keeps anyone else from hearing Phillips when he leans over and asks, in a calm voice, whether Steve has considered the price of his little trip. One of the greatest scientific minds on the side of the Allies and -- 

...

The Howling Commandos find Howard Stark staggering through the forest between Austria and Italy. Morita almost shoots him because he won't stop stumbling towards them, because he's wearing a German greatcoat scavenged off the corpse of an officer whose body he found by the side of the road with a high-caliber round drilled through his forehead, nice bit of shooting, and then, Cap comes jogging over the rise, sees the face underneath the beard, recognizes the voice that has gone almost completely hoarse. 

Howard goes to his knees in the pine needles. 

It's been a rainy spring. Howard spent months in an underground bunker, and when he gets back to base, Howard shaves his beard, trims down the mustache, takes a shower, eats three C-ration cans without pausing to take a breath, drinks two Cokes, and is chain-smoking his way through most of a pack of Chesterfields when he asks for someone to pass the word for Steve Rogers. 

Howard is still in the infirmary tent. There are burns on his right arm, and he lost fifteen pounds while captured, but otherwise, he isn't hurt. He doesn't even have the runs from drinking out of puddles for three days before the Commandos found him, and Steve and Howard they met on the floor of the test site for the Serum; they met again on the plane, and Howard waits until the nurses and doctor step away. There is a light on by the side of the bed they've assigned to Howard, but he isn't in it, and it casts a yellow light over his face. The cigarette glows red in his left hand. 

Overhead, Steve can hear rain falling onto the roof of the tent. 

Steve pulls up a packing crate and sits on it. 

"One of your squad is a sniper, right?" Howard asks. "I saw a Mosin-Nagant on his back."

"Yes," Steve says. 

"Is he good?"

"Very good." 

"I'll make him better, Rogers. He needs a sight for it, one that'll make it worth his while to stick his head out enough to look through it." Howard reaches over, picks up a few sheets of paper, and hands them to Steve: lifted from the doctor's desk when he wasn't looking, because there are care instructions for someone named _Martin, Lee_ on the other side, and Steve looks down at optical calculations written on the back and a sketch of lenses with notes. 

Steve looks back at Howard's face. The light from the bedside lamp makes Howard's face look yellow, but his chest and shoulders are still blue. 

Howard stubs out the cigarette. "What is your uniform made out of, Rogers? Looks like field cloth with wool batting in it. Do you want something that might actually stop a knife? 

It's still raining overhead, and Steve picks his words carefully, because Howard has, up to this point, refused to talk to any debriefers, "Howard, what happened to Peggy? Did she --"

Howard Stark has no intention of stopping weapons manufacture: his problem is _insufficient quantity_ and _insufficient quality_ and _not enough dead HYDRA agents._. 

...

There wasn't enough -- 

...

The suit needed more -- 

...

"Carbon polymer," Howard says, holding a sample of it up to Steve. "Should withstand your average German bayonet." 

The stuff feels oddly light in Steve's hands, oddly light in the hands, and it stops a couple knives, and once, a bullet: it was meant for his heart, and it leaves a nasty, nasty bruise over his sternum that makes him wince for a full week whenever he reaches for something too quickly. It's better than the alternative, in fact, and Steve brings the uniform back to Howard to check, as well as the bullet, flattened into something like a very thick dime. 

Howard nods at the bullet, runs his hands across the part of the uniform where the bullet struck to see if there is anything he needs to mend. 

"It should be fine, but if you leave it for me overnight, I'll put in a new section for you."

...

Tony has the luxury of not telling anyone about Yinsen; Howard doesn't, and he tells Steve first, then Phillips, then the official debriefers: they both survived the crash, though Howard was badly wounded. Peggy told HYDRA who he was in order to secure medical attention for him, and their top scientist put together something hooked up to a car battery as a stop-gap. They wanted Howard to make weapons based on the tesseract for them, but he built a mechanical suit instead. A human-sized version of a tank. 

There wasn't enough time. 

They needed more time.  
...

Steve comes back to the workshop a little past three in the morning. There are reports of HYDRA being on the move, and the cross-channel plane takes off in half an hour: Steve needs to take his uniform, repaired or not, and finds Howard asleep at his work bench. The lights are all off in the room except for the one over his head at the bench, and Steve wakes Howard as gently as he can. Howard starts when Steve puts a hand on his shoulder. 

"Suit is done," he says. "I synthesized more of the polymer."

He hands it to Steve, shows him where he cut away the old, damaged and put in new ones. He hasn't had time to spray paint the new section blue, so it's a dull gray. 

Steve takes the suit in his hands and looks over his shoulder at the work bench. A mostly-empty bottle of Scotch, because 25 year old Scotch isn't a luxury, it's part of the equipment. No tumbler to speak of. Twenty-six cards dealt out, thirteen to a player. Howard's drafting desk faces a wall. 

"We played a lot of rummy," Howard says, rubs his face, and goes to the wall and starts to turn lights on all over the workshop. Do Morita or Jones need anything? Is Dum Dum supplied with his new explosives? Does Barnes have enough boat-tailed bullets? 

...

Thirteen cards a hand: Peggy teaches Howard how to play rummy. They build a suit together; Howard remembers her hands lifting the palladium ring out of the sand mold. His hands still shook too much; the car battery was beginning to fail, and Zola had started making hints. Produce some results. Give me something show Schmidt, and I'll get you a new car battery that produces a continuous, reliable source of -- 

There wasn't enough time. 

They needed more time.

... 

Peggy teaches Howard how to play rummy; they talk a little about their lives. Peggy has family alive and living on both sides of the Atlantic. Howard never says to Peggy: _They're going to kill me, you, either way. And if they don't, I'll probably be dead in a week._

She never comments that what he's building doesn't look much like a _Vergeltungswaffe_ with technology borrowed from the tessaract. 

They both want to live, but the suit takes a while to complete powering. HYDRA sends two guards to investigate. The explosion at the door takes them out, and Peggy looks at the bodies, looks at Howard inside the suit, looks back at the bodies and the energy guns. Howard is a once-in-a-century genius. HYDRA has weapons thirty, four, maybe even fifty years beyond anything the Allies have. 

Peggy picks up an energy gun. She doesn't fire into the air. 

...

Howard wakes from a dream of lying against a wall, the left half of his torso burned away by a HYDRA energy weapon. They are in a corridor of the research laboratory; Peggy is in the suit, and she is looking at him, but it's only for a moment. The door is a few more steps along the corridor; light is pouring in through the expanse, and it hurts his eyes. Howard knows the next part: Peggy is going to pull the faceplate down and walk away from him. He saved her life; he bought more time for the suit. They both have a pretty decent idea of what kind of agony the HYDRA energy weapons cause, but she's going to walk away from him. 

He wakes, breathless with anger, and there is an empty bottle of Scotch, twenty-six cards, fanned out in two hands. 

Steve Rogers finds, somehow, a picture of her from a newspaper clipping. 

He tapes it to the inside of his compass, so that the needle always points to Peggy for _north_.

...

In the HYDRA camp, Steve Rogers rescued an old friend from Brooklyn. Howard shows him a new sight, and the man looks down at skeptically. 

"Light," he says. "How good is it?" 

"Give it a shot," Howard says, watches the guy brings it up to his right eye. 

...

"Hello, Howard," Peggy Carter says. 

...

"How have they treated you since coming back, Howard?" Peggy Carter says. 

...

Steve Rogers has a friend from home in the Howling Commandos: Howard makes a judgment call and decides not to question how a boy from Brooklyn learns how to slide, from a distance of five hundred yards, a long, boat-tailed bullet reliably into a sweet spot maybe half an inch across where the skull met the neck. He gets results, doesn't he? They have some morning meetings to fine-tune or repair the sniper equipment that Howard produces for him; once or twice, the guy brings around Steve's body armor for mending after a mission, because Steve Rogers is a busy man these days. 

Howard remembers a navy uniform and a pale face with circles under the eyes. Sometimes, Howard smelled like liquor, but the man never actually seemed drunk. Howard has own suspicions about this, but he doesn't have any other memories of -- 

...

That is a lie. 

Howard has a memory of being out in a field with Barnes on a mid-summer morning, before the sun was really, before the base was really even awake. The dew was still on the grass, and Barnes was on his stomach, steadily moving down the line and blowing the fuck out of some targets set five hundred yards down the field. Howard declined to get the one suit that still fit him in the chest wet and stained with grass, so he was standing and smoking a cigarette and squinting down the field, trying to see where the targets were. 

Barnes straightened up out of prone and looked out at the field. 

"Not bad," he said. "I like the new scope." 

Howard shrugged, and Barnes reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a small flask, unscrewed the lid. Barnes's breath had smelled like liquor, but didn't seem drunk, and he was polite enough to hand it up to Howard. Howard took a slug -- low-grade whiskey -- and in return, he offered Barnes a cigarette. Howard lit it for him, and Barnes sat in the gross. Howard continued to stand. 

"So they had you at a HYDRA research facility," Barnes said, looking up with just his eyes. 

"They did." 

"Do any experimental work while you were there?"

A stupid question considering that Howard had a blue-white light in his chest roughly as wide across as his palm, glowing out over the top of his shirt, but Howard answered, flicked a little ash from the end of his cigarette. "Not the kind you're interested in." 

A stupid answer, considering the rifle in Barnes's hands, the knife at his waist, the fact that the last time out with Howling Commandos, Barnes had engaged in acts of _conspicuous personal valor without regard to safety_ , including two terse Steve Rogers sentences that Howard knew to read as Barnes sneaking up on a HYDRA guard tower in broad daylight, climbing the access ladder in absolute silence with a knife in his teeth, slitting the throat of the first guard, breaking the necks of other two, all before they could give the alert, then raising the gate for the rest of the Commandos. 

Barnes looks up sharply, but Howard doesn't blink, meets the look. 

Eventually, Barnes looks back down at the rifle, then finishes his cigarette, has another slug from the flask, then gets to wrapping the rifle with oil cloth. The sun is starting to come out, and it catches on Barnes's hair; Howard stays standing and watches the white face, the steady hands. How does a boy from Nassau and 14th in Greenpoint become a sniper? 

All in all, Howard knows he should have guessed at the progress that HYDRA had made on _human conditioning_. 

...

Howard comes into the room. It's lit from overhead by a yellow light. 

"Hello, Howard," Peggy says. 

"Hello, Peggy," Howard says, pulls out a chair, and sits down across from her. "You asked to see me." 

"I did," she says, smiling. The side of her face is a massive, ugly bruise from being hit, Howard understands, by Steve's thrown vibranium shield, and each of her hands is separately chained to the table. "How are you feeling?"

"Do you mean this?" Howard taps the glass in his chest. "Still works." 

Peggy smiles. "And how are they treating you since you came back, Howard?" 

"Can't complain. I've got plenty of work to do."

Peggy smiles at this, and Howard leans back in his chair. He takes a moment, then makes his voice sound casual. "What did they do to you, Peggy?" 

"Isn't it obvious?"

It is. Her left arm is now metal from shoulder to fingertip. 

...

When Howard was at his lowest point in the factory camp, the lights were off; they were in the room that HYDRA wanted him to use a workshop, and the illumination came from the main yard coming through the windows. Peggy sat across from him, and she said a few words about _legacy_ and the great _Howard Stark_. Howard told her a story about how his grandfather had gotten started in the business: he worked for a firm in New York City, designing cannons and artillery and the machines that made them. One day, his boss found out that his prize employee wanted to leave someday and start his own firm, build his own factories, put his own name on the side of buildings. 

So the boss called Stark into his office; Stark thought it was to discuss the new designs he and his team had submitted, but instead, there were a couple guys from the factory standing there, and they beat the shit out of him. The boss stood over Stark on the floor and said, slowly, using small words, that a dirty, uneducated immigrant like Stark would never succeed in the defense business. You had to have skill. You had to have connections. People had to like you. 

"What happened after that?" 

Howard thought about telling her the truth and saying _he went on fucking the guy's wife, then walked out four years later with the company's best engineers and all of the clients_ , but he turned his head and saw Peggy looking at him. Quiet, cool. Measuring. Howard had never seen her without makeup. Funny how women looked without it, and Peggy looked like she had been crying before, but now, she was dry-eyed, cool, and calm. She was lit along one side of her face by the lights from the factory yard outside. 

Howard realized that he suddenly, strangely cared very much about -- 

"So what happened?" Peggy asked. 

And Howard didn't take his eyes from her face. He said quietly, "He had a son who was smarter than him, and my dad found himself a nice-looking, politically connected American woman. And my dad had a goddamn genius for a son." 

Peggy didn't laugh, but she did raise her eyebrows and smile. 

...

Now, they're in an interrogation room, lit from above by a lamp. 

"I'm told the man you threw off the train was the Captain's best friend,"

The smile on Peggy's face has enough contempt, enough amusement, and enough pride in it mean a lot of things, ranging from _That's why I did it_ to _I hear that when he was on the table, James Barnes offered to be a lot of men's_ best friend.

Just to see the reaction, Howard leans forward. Peggy leans forward, still smiling, and Howard puts his elbows on the table. She can't make a parallel action, because her hands are chained to the table, and the chains are fairly short. 

"James Barnes," Howard says. 

"The Captain's best friend," Peggy replies, smiling. 

"Tell me," Howard says. "I bet if I came back with you, like your master wants, he'd tell you to be mine." He reaches out, as if to touch her. "Do you think he'd stop me from taking your other arm?" 

...

Phillips isn't taking any chances, so he puts Howard into the brig. Not just the brig, the one deep underground, set in concrete. Howard leans back against the wall, takes off his jacket, and convinces Morita, who is one of the two Howling Commandos standing guard, to give him a cigarette. 

Morita is nice enough to light it for him, and Howard leans back against the wall, smoking and thinking back on the jolt of real, honest fear he saw on Peggy's face. 

...

Steve Rogers is -- 

...

Steve Rogers is -- 

... 

Afterwards, Howard finds Steve sitting in what had been his office. 

"You're going after Red Skull," Howard says, by way of knocking. There isn't technically a door anymore, and Steve glances up, briefly, then looks back down. "I want in."

"We need you in your worksh -- "

"I've got something you should see."

Steve looks tired, seems tired, walks like a man who is tired, but he follows Howard out of the room, down the corridor, down the stairs. The hallway is charred because of Peggy, but Howard welded the doors of his workshop shut before going to see her, and they held against the fire she started. Howard got a torch out and burned through the plate afterwards, and he shows Steve the armor laid out on the table. He shows him the headpiece, shows him the plates, how it will fit over the body and fit around the arc reactor, Steve finally says that he'll talk to Phillips about letting Howard come along. 

Howard nods. He steps away and reaches under the lab bench. 

Peggy broke out. Zola is dead. They found him in his cell, throat slit from ear to ear, and Peggy killed a half-dozen men on her way out. 

"I hear Dernier is dead, too," Howard says, pulling out a bottle of Scotch, still mostly full. Steve nods, and Howard puts two glasses next to the bottle of Scotch. He reaches down and gets a second bottle, brand new and completely full, and he and puts it next to the first bottle, the glasses. 

"I can't get drunk," Steve says. 

"Your friend couldn't either," Howard replies, and Steve's head comes up. For the first time since Howard came to his door, Steve is actually paying attention, actually looking at Howard. 

Howard sits down on a stool and pours himself half a glass. 

"I imagine it did something for him," Howard adds, pouring out a similar dose and sliding it over to Steve, "so maybe you should try." 

...

Howard comes from a hard, tough school of business. To convince him to _deliver_ goods, the Red Skull drags Peggy up to the extraction field for the tesseract, crackling with energy and glowing blue-white. He forces Peggy down onto her knees, pushes her face down and down and down until Howard can smell burned hair, singed edge of a shirt collar. Peggy struggles up against hand, and in return, he pushes her even closer. The motor next to the containment field takes on a different noise: cycling to relieve the strain on the capacitors, Howard guesses. 

A tiny strand of the containment field reaches out and touched her cheek. It's strangely gentle-looking for the effect. Locked limbs. Screaming. Howard remembers the Red Skull's response after it ended was to hold Peggy's face even closer to the field. Howard remembers Peggy's face, eyes closed, tears coming out from under her eyes, utterly terrified after her first brush with the containment field, trying to keep from begging. 

...

Three quarters of the way through the first bottle, Steve reaches into his pocket and puts his compass on the table between them. He doesn't open it; Steve opens his mouth, but doesn't actually ask about the chances of changing Peggy back to the way she had been before. 

...

Howard Stark is -- 

...

Phillips tells Howard to stay at home. He isn't losing the greatest engineering mind of the century again, no matter what the mind tries to say: unless Phillips wants to take his men directly into the teeth of a HYDRA assault and lose two-thirds of them overrunning an entrenched enemy dug into a mountain, he needs both the Howling Commandos and the equivalent of close aerial support. How is a bomber from three thousand feet up going to provide close aerial support inside a mountain? Howard shows Steve the lighter, smaller, improved suit, tells him about how the pieces are made of carbon polymer in the Captain's suit, bonded to an alloy made of gold and aluminium. Impregnated with gaseous vibranium. Not enough to reflect back energy blasts like Steve's shield, but enough to -- 

Howard shows Steve the gauntlets, the leg coverings. The chestplate lying on the table, and Howard carefully, carefully runs his hand along the inside edge that will fit around his arc reactor: he hasn't smoothed the rough edges off yet. Howard hasn't painted the suit either, let alone give it a fancy red and gold color scheme. It's rough work. The leads physically clip and lock into the arc reactor; when Howard puts the armor on, he leans against the wall and takes a heavy slug of whiskey and lets it burn on the way down before a technician brings a hand, carefully, to the scars around the arc reactor. 

Gloves. Gauntlets. Howard doesn't have a helmet with a faceplate like his son from another universe would recognize; instead, it's a close-fitting cap, built along the same lines as Steve's helmet. After all, Howard's best friend isn't a computer program that will rebroadcast the external world on the inside of the helmet. Semiconductors haven't been invented yet, although Howard has considered the insulating properties of silicon carbide. 

Phillips tells Howard to stay home, but he doesn't say no when Howard comes streaking in twenty feet off the ground and vaporizes the concrete gates of the mountain base. 

...

"How does the light in your chest work?"

"Tesseract," Howard says. 

...

"How does the light in your chest work?"

"Tesseract," Howard says. "You know what that is?"

Steve nods. He can't get drunk, but he can have enough to feel like his fingers are numb and his mouth doesn't quite work properly. He'll settle for that, and Howard pours Steve another half-inch of liquor. 

"Red Skull has it."

"Everyone has it. As far as I can tell, it exists everywhere, through everything and through all time. The part Red Skull has is a part that decided to show itself." Howard taps the light inside his chest. "Talked this part to let me borrow some of it for a little bit." 

Steve digests this, and Howard can see on Steve's face as part of the alcohol works itself out of his system and Steve grows visibly more sober. It's in the eyes; it's in the mouth. Howard can see the eyes narrow, the mouth straighten. "Does it hurt?" 

"Yes," Howard says and reaches for more whiskey. 

...

Howard thinks about making a comment about how the moment you think you know what's going on in a woman's head, your goose is well and truly cooked. 

"Did you?" Steve asks. 

Howard shrugs. 

"All that time in the cave, were you -- "

Howard cuts him off. "Was I in love with her?" 

They're still sitting in the lab with the whiskey between them, and Steve looks up from the compass lying next to the whiskey. "Were you in love with her?" 

Howard opens the compass and looks at the face for a moment. Black and white newsprint, cut from a newspaper. 

...

Afterwards, Howard pieces together what happens. There are orders to bring him to the Red Skull directly rather than executing him in the field, and Peggy puts him on his knees. She pushes his head back. She kisses him: the Commandos have been tracking Steve through the complex, since every HYDRA plant had the same format, and they come through the glass on a zipline. Steve has a choice between following Red Skull into the escape pod, or going with Peggy towards the hangar with the plane. 

Steve goes for the hangar with the plane bound for the East Coast. 

...

" -- don't tell me you've never flown a plane, Rogers." 

The line crackles. 

...

Howard sits down at the console. He takes the compass out of his pocket and puts it on the console next to the microphone. 

...

Afterwards, Howard pieces together what happens: the first time he wore the suit, he had a clear memory of each and every moment, but his memory of the second time is blurred. Adrenaline, maybe? He remembers coming low over the heads of the Army and HYDRA both and vaporizing the concrete gates. He works through the halls, and he comes to the hangar and found Steve Rogers trying to match the plane by foot. 

He must have said something to the effect of _Come on_. 

Howard has a memory of flying towards the jet with Rogers on his back, hanging on for dear life. 

...

Afterwards, Howard turns over a memory of sitting with Peggy at a lab bench; she had a piece of delicate soldering in her hands. Howard came back to the bench, put the heavy leather gloves down, and watched her work. There were two hands of gin rummy laid out on the table just in case a guard happened to look inside. 

...

" -- Skull wasn't on the plane." Steve says. The static takes away intonation, tone. "Still loose." 

Howard pulls the chair a little closer, and he knows he is shouting. "Rogers, listen to me. You have plenty of time. Do you see the wheel in front of you? I know what the inside of that plane looks like. Listen to me."

...

They're still sitting in the lab with whiskey between them, and Steve looks up from the compass lying next to the whiskey. "Were you in love with her?" 

...

There is no afterwards for -- 

...

Howard can put together that Steve fights Peggy on the plane. He assumes that Steve either killed her or put her into the ocean: he was injured at the console, panting into the microphone, and Howard understands that any one of the injury or the crash or the cold or the water could have killed him. 

...

They're still sitting in the lab with whiskey between them, and Steve looks up from the compass lying next to the whiskey. His face is a mix of guilt and grief and a strange form of anger, all overlaid with very slight drunkenness. "Were you in love with her?" 

Howard opens the compass and looks at the face for a moment. Black and white newsprint, cut from a newspaper. He looks at the face for a long time before closing the compass. 

Howard closes his eyes. 

...

Afterwards, Howard funds an expedition on his own dime to find the tesseract, the shield, the bones on the metal console. They come back empty-handed, so he sends them a second time. A third time. A fourth time, he goes himself, goes down in the suit, and when he finds the wreck, the only light on the sea floor comes from the arc reactor inside his chest. How long has it been? The plane is split in two, and turning in the darkness, Howard puts together the angle at which the plane hit the water, the time it took for the fuselage to snap in two. The bones are white; the paint on the shield has turned black and sloughs off the shield in a sheet when Howard, using the suit, picks up the shield, checks its condition. 

The bones are smaller than Howard expected them to be, tucked up halfway underneath the shield. They're fragile: he tries to take a bone from the forearm, and it disintegrates on the way up, so Howard takes the shield. They'll come back for the bombs. 

He leaves the bones, and he puts the compass next to them.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [marmolita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmolita), who asked for this during Wipfest 2012 and got me working on it again with clenched-teeth determination that I was going to goddamn finish this or else, and to [destronomics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/destronomics), as always, for providing me with that AUGH I CAN'T FINISH THIS push. Also, because I told myself that I wouldn't start writing Red Soldier!Bucky until I finished this.


End file.
